Gripla - 01.01.2002, Síða 118

116
GRIPLA
At that moment Thorbrand Thorleiksson leaped up on the roof and cut
through Gunnar’s bow string. Gunnar grasped his halberd with both
hands and turned quickly towards him and drove the halberd through
him and flung him off the roof. Then Asbrand, Thorbrand’s brother,
leaped up; Gunnar thrust at him with the haiberd, and Asbrand brought
his shield to meet it. The halberd went through the shield and between
the upper arm and forearm. Gunnar twisted the halberd so that the
shield split and both his arm-bones broke, and Asbrand fell off the
roof. (Cook, 127)
The contrast between “slashed” and “cut,” between “whirled” and “tumed,”
between “were shattered” and “broke” and between “toppled” and “fell” indi-
cates how MM-HP have spiced the scene with herbs that are more tangy than
those in the original. I have not made a count of the number of different words
used in Njáls saga and in the MM-HP translation, but I am willing to bet my
copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that the list used by these Icelandic translators far
exceeds the 3,135 lexemes used by the thirteenth-century Icelander who com-
posed the saga.
3. Consistency
A related principle is to use the same English word for the same Icelandic
word in all occurrences, or as much as possible. Dasent does this with great
care, and I attempt the same. The editorial team for the Leifur Eiríksson pro-
ject, which resulted in the publication of The Complete Sagas oflcelanders in
1997, prepared lengthy lists of key terms, in fields ranging from law to ship-
building, together with standardized English equivalents such as “follower”
(hirðmaðr) and “hayfield” (tún) and “godi” (goði). Whether in a large-scale
project involving forty sagas, or in translating a single saga, consistency seems
desirable. Key concepts like sæmd and virðing and drengskapur, and of course
legal terminology, should be translated consistently. This, however, is not al-
ways possible: I found that the context required some variation in the four
occurrences of drengskapur, for example: I used “decency” in Chs. 8 and 9,
“manhood” in Ch. 91, and “generosity” in Ch. 123.
The Leifur Eiríksson list did not include “little” words like kasta, for
example, but according to my principle this word should be consistently trans-
lated as “throw” — I therefore regret that in the above passage 1 had Gunnarr